This video, via University of Warwick professor Duncan Lockerby, explains The Molecular Music Box – an approach to music composition that explores how simple rules can lead to rich patterns.Continue reading →

‘Engineer Guy’ Bill Hammack is the professor you wish you had. He’s a member of the faculty at the University of Illinois and the creator of a series of videos that explain technology.

This set of videos take a look at Albert Michelson’s Harmonic Analyzer – a nineteenth century mechanical computer that performed Fourier analysis by using gears, springs and levers to calculate with sines and cosines—an astonishing feat in an age before electronic computers.

Fourier analysis is the study of how complex functions can be broken down into simple ones. In the area of sound and synthesis, Fourier analysis can be used to break down any periodic sound into component sine (and cosine) waves. And, going in the opposite direction, sine waves can be combined to create complex sounds.

This is now done with computers, but 100 years ago, it was done with machines. Continue reading →

Developer Jesper Nordin has introduced ScaleGen for iPad, described as ‘the ultimate tool for musicians who want to explore new ways of thinking about music.’

ScaleGen is a tool for organizing pitches into custom scales and tunings. It lets you create and audition scales within the app, and then export it as a MIDI file or to their gestural music app Gestrument.

It goes far beyond mainstream types of scales, letting you experiment with up to 24 notes per octave, use historical and experimental microtonal tuning and even scales that are different in each octave, like the overtone series.